An airplane has, for the first time, automatically landed itself after an in-flight emergency, according to the system’s manufacturer.
Two people emerged unscathed from the Beechcraft Super King Air 200 after it stopped on the runway at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Denver, according to video posted by emergency responders.
The twin-engine turboprop landed under the control of Garmin’s Autoland system, which the company says is now installed on about 1,700 airplanes. “This was the first use of Autoland from start-to-finish in an actual emergency,” Garmin said in a statement.
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The pilots could not turn off the automatic comms which were saying that they were incapacitated. They could turn off the emergency autoland feature as a whole with a press of a button (someone else linked a source for the FAQ).
The article does not say that, and I have not seen a source that does. The FAQ says holding the autopilot disconnect button deactivates the system. If two turboprop pilots can’t manage that, then they are incapacitated.
Yeah I think that’s going too far.
Look, the fact that this has never been needed before is a testament to how often all the redundant safety systems work the way they’re supposed to. It’s not like there’s a problem here.
That said, when the auto-land system was triggered it worked as it was supposed to, landed the plane safely, radio’d its intentions, and nobody was injured. Keep in mind it was triggered during an actual emergency, exactly when it’s supposed to. If the pilots weren’t familiar enough with the safety systems on their plane to disable the auto-land functionality, then they’re functionally ceding control of the plane to the emergency systems, and at that point it’s correct for the automated systems to take over. In this case it seems the pilots decided not to take control back. So really, this was just the safety protocols working as intended.
I’m glad everyone including the pilots were fine though, that really is the most important thing.
I almost wonder if it is smarter to have the autoland not be possible to turn off if pilots were for example hypoxic / mentally incapacitated.
Heh, good luck trying to push an automation technology that a pilot can’t disable. You’re right, there probably are situations where that makes sense, but they would be very rare edge cases. And pilots really do hate being taken out of the control loop. Ideally they really don’t want there to be any computer action that doesn’t have an override (which I think generally makes sense).
“Task failed successfully.”
Also, “you are experiencing a car accident”
God that’s one of my favorite movies
Is that something Sylvester Stallone? My mind jumped to Demolition Man… But it’s been ages…
Will Smith’s iRobot movie loosely based on the short novels by Asimov.
It’s a good film.
oh - I believe I actually saw that at some point. Although I may have only seen parts of it. Might rewatch. Thank you :)
I, Robot (2004). It’s great
I liked the movie, but the short stories were better.
I’m especially fond of the one where they developed the robot religion and supplanted the humans that had assembled them because they were more precise/efficient/safe at the task.
I’ve read one of the Asimov collections books, I think it had one of the I robot ones in it. I mostly remember the car retirement one and the one where a man mishears aliens and tells them never to come back and so earth never gets visited again
and the pilots “made the decision to leave the system engaged,” Townsley said.So it still landed automatically though. That’s the entire point of the article. Pilots didn’t control it, the fact that it wasn’t a real emergency is entirely moot.
Well no, the whole point of the news event was the supposedly real emergency. Autoland has worked in testing and training for yearrs. This time it was basically credited with saving humans, but it didn’t do that. Instead it surfaced a bug in its own progamming, it sounds like.
What bug? It worked as it was supposed to.
There was a loss of cabin pressure (a real emergency) and it decided the pilots were unresponsive. The pilots could have taken control back, but by not doing that, they were functionally unresponsive. I don’t see a bug here.
The first automatic landing of a commercial airliner was apparently in 1965. So yeah it was just the entire process for this individual emergency system by this company being call a first as well. 60 years ago apparently we succeeded, which makes sense, 4 years before we landed on the moon, believe that was 69’
Not only that, the soviet shuttle, Buran, autolanded, uncrewed, from space, in 1988
This falls in the same category as the MCAS crashes. An automated system wrested control from the pilots, and the system evidently could not be disabled. That is the exact scenario that caused the MCAS crashes. While the outcome here was much more positive than “it crashed”, an automated system refusing to allow pilots to exert manual control is Not Okay. The positive outcome is incidental; the refusal of the automation to allow resumption of manual control is the core issue. That is a flaw that should ground the system until a bug fix is deployed. My dogmatic opinion on this comes from having worked in aerospace previously - this isn’t ivory tower speculation/assertion.
The only thing though, is that is absolutely not what happened here, at all.
Here’s a quote from the (quite short) article:
The pilots saw the warnings and presumably could have taken over by doing just about anything, but with no passengers to put in jeopardy, they decided to sit back and see what happened.
There is no flaw here, no bug, this is not a problem. This is what happens when everything works.
Edit: Well, not everything was working, that beechcraft does have to have its pressurization system checked out for sure.
Yea not every airport has a tower. The Garmin system cannot detect obstructions. It announces an intent to land and lands.
If it finds an airport with an ILS runway, and it has even remotely up to date aviation charts with minimum altitudes what obstructions does it need to avoid?
Uncontrolled airports probably aren’t where this system is programmed to fly into in an emergency. Not only would that be more difficult to program, but I suspect there wouldn’t be emergency crews to assist with whatever the emergency was either.
Does it only choose suitable airports? Like ones where they have a system to support automatic landings? I would think those should have ATC
So… my $1400 DJI Avaya2 has a more sophisticated automatic landing system? Yeah… lots of stuff just started making sense 🤣
Planes have ILS.
And presumably lots of other expensive acronyms that I don’t care about, because I’ll never own a plane 🤣
Think the acronyms are bad now? Wait until your plane is in the cloud!
“Plane pod bay doors open unexpectedly! Engaging emergency AWS FaaS! AWS unavailable! Engaging GCP FaaS! GCP unavailable! Local CDN AZ cannot be found! No MSP available! Engaging SRE! Blaming DNS!”
Pilot: “We haven’t even taken off yet! Also, I told you to open the doors, you dumb AI!”
“Good catch! Would you like me to continue blaming DNS?”
I mean that’s essential when your HAL malfunctions right? ;-)
I have the upmost respect for pilots… I don’t know that many personally… although one flying lesson comes acutely to mind:
I was in the back of a small plane, not even sure there was a seat… though I believe there was a lap belt. My old boss was in the passenger seat, his friend was giving the lesson, the GPS was blaring “Altitude, altitude, altitude!” every 30 seconds…
Took all my self control to concentrate on not crapping my pants :-) But still an amazing experience. Glad I went!
You make a wonderfully narrative point about the necessity of all those acronyms. I’m curious what was in your pods?
Then why are you trying to have a technical discussion on this matter?
I would have called it a sarcastic discussion… I make an ass of myself for the amusement of the “class”. People laugh, people cry, a good time is had by all.
I do appreciate the achievement here, sounds very cool and I’m looking forward to learning more. Seems like I need to learn a lot more acronyms first though ;-)
Having control wrested from you in an emergency or not is relevent. Boeings MCAS comes to mind.
The cabin lost pressure, it activated because an emergency happened. Then the pilots decided to leave it on to see if it worked during an actual emergency situation.
The very short article covered these details lol.
Hypoxia. The safety system worked flawlessly.